Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The biggest nerd in high school -- who's now a reputable Chinese scholar -- used to tote around the ancient bible of military strategy. Could Sun Tzu make me successful, too?
Jul 4, 2005 | There was this kid in our high school named Peter K. who was a total nerd. And I mean total nerd: Peter K. achieved a purity of nerdiness that was rare to behold, even in a high school that boasted its fair share of nerds, myself included. What differentiated Peter K.'s nerdiness from my own was its lack of shame. I skulked and squirmed my way through high school, fearing to speak of my nerdier obsessions, and on occasion dropping friends who threatened, in their fellow nerdiness, to relegate me publicly to nerddom, or conversely, in their lack of nerdiness, to highlight my ineluctable nerditude. Peter K., on the other hand, was the sort of nerd who in sunny unawareness would publicly expostulate upon his nerdsome pursuits, blind to the smirks his nerdiose declamations provoked.
Peter K.'s nerdfulness was all the more piquant for its lack of any physical symptom. Blond, freckled, with fair skin and striking blue eyes, neither short nor tall, not lacking in athletic coordination, untainted by acne and unexceptional in his choice of dress, with the solid oval face of a Dutch farmer, Peter K. in fact bore a peculiar resemblance to Andrew E., the viciously sarcastic Mod who was arguably the coolest kid in school. The collective repression of this fact was part of the invisible force that bound the school together. It was sort of quantum. There was no clear reason why Peter K. should be a nerd and Andrew E. the coolest kid in school; they might have switched places as easily and instantaneously as a quark flipping from strange to charmed. If in fact that is what quarks do.
The white-hot core of Peter K.'s arbitrary nerditi was his study of the Chinese language. Chinese was not even offered at our school: several times a week, Peter K. would head off to another school in the area to take his weird language class, waiting lonely at the bus stop, ignoring the caustic gazes of the other, normal kids crossing the street for a sandwich on their free period. Peter K.'s Chinese was like a disease. It was invisible and horrible, warped and infectious. Sometimes we would ask him to say something in Chinese, like you ask the kid with six toes to take his shoe off, and out it would come, twisted and hysterical, his voice suddenly possessed by the mad tonal screech of a million Red Guards pissing on their professors, of flying kung fu masters, imperial eunuchs and Communist hordes swarming across the Yalu.
Today, the remorseless logic of life being what it is, Peter K. is a respected professor of Chinese studies at a mid-rank American university, appearing periodically on Chinese television shows to offer what I take to be intelligent opinions on the state of Chinese-American relations, in what I take to be flawless Mandarin. I caught him by sheer foul luck on CCTV when I was in Shanghai last year. I meanwhile am a struggling journalist attempting to cobble together some shred of credibility as an Asia hand, living in Hanoi, and gamely wrapping my lips around the cruel tonality of Vietnamese. Had I started when Peter K. did, perhaps I would be somewhere by now. (And what of Andrew E.? His name, Googled, returns a windswept silence.) But here's what I am no longer sure of: Do I remember Peter K. walking through the student lounge holding a copy of Sun Tzu's "Art of War"? I think I remember this, but it may be a chimera. It would be too perfect, right? The nerdiness of war strategy, of ancient war strategy, with its musty D&D reek, wedded to the nerdiness of Peter K.'s unspeakable tongue.
And, the remorseless logic of life being yet more what it is, Sun Tzu's "Art of War" is these days a business-management tome, the kind of book read by anti-nerds -- the sociable, not overtly stupid, popular kids, the guys who were good at baseball, uninspired but diligent in class, took a job on Wall Street after college, and now prod each other in the arm on the subway to work: "Dude, you gotta read Sun Tzu's "Art of War." It's awesome. What do you think about shorting Nokia?" It's the kind of book read by the world's Andrew E.'s, its George W. Bushes.
And why not? Maybe "The Art of War" is awesome. Maybe it can explain to me what strategic errors I've made over the past 20 years. Maybe it harbors secret lessons about how to be a cruel, determined warrior king, the kind of guy who always wins -- the kind of guy who rules our country today, in fact. Maybe Peter K. knew exactly what he was doing carrying that thing around. If in fact he ever did carry it around.
Plus, it's really short. And you can read it on the Internet, for free. So when I was invited to contribute to this series, I thought, why not take the easy way out? Or as Sun Tzu puts it, "In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak." A man after my own heart!
